Jokes that aren't really all that funny in the end (aka At least SQL Server isn't on our case)

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/10/25 10:46 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/10/25/5664770.aspx

SQL Server likes to keep a bit of independence from the operating system.

At the same time, they like for the experience to be the same no matter what version you are running on -- because any behavior difference between the platforms on which it runs is a particularly bad pain point for customers.

Especially if the behavior difference affects the actual data....

It is for this reason that they have always carried their own data around for both collation and casing operations, and have since Sphinx (SQL Server 7.0) through two different collation models (Sphinx and post-Sphinx) and one for casing (Sphinx and beyond).

Now just as in Windows (a point I have made time and again), Collation and Case are not the same -- and especially relevant is the fact that Case != IgnoreCase. And they deal with the same random customer issues about the differences between those operations which can often seem less intuitive (even though they really do make sense in the end when you think about them usually).

Over the years of course, there have been times when Peter (and later Jun, and even later Brandon) are nagging Windows about bugs in the way their CompareString snapshot behaves that affects them.

But I can often get a little humor/levity out of the fact at least one can't claim that SQL Server is on our case in those situations1,2,3,4,5!

You may now groan about the nature of puns.

1- If English is not your native language you likely didn't get the punchline of this joke; puns are like that.2 - Possibly if the US is not your country, you didn't either; puns are like that too, linguistically.3 - Since my need to create "clever" titles gave it away in the title and can hardly be accused of burying the lead, you might hve gotten the joke long beford the end.4 - Frankly, the build-up took so long that even in the en-US case you are unlikely to do more than groan when you got there.5 - Even ignoring the above, the joke was not all that funny, so I somehow doubt the juice was really worth the squeeze....